Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Summary 5 (6 & 7)

Slavoj Zizek's essay Rumsfeld's Unknown Known is about America's hypocrisy in dealing with war crimes. Zizek specifically focuses on the Abu Ghraib torture photographs. He compares the torture to performance art and American hazing rituals. He points out many of the American government's obvious lies and weird defensive tactics. Zizek contrasts America and Iraq, saying that Iraq is brutal and direct where America hides under the guise of defending itself.

I actually thought this was an interesting article even though I'm not interested in politics. Torture is interesting. It is also interesting to point out how these issues are responded to by the government. Politics are definitely a performance.

The next essay is "Among the Inept" by Erica Goode, which is about a study showing that people who do badly at things being more confident than people who do things well. It basically just goes down the list of things. It was pretty funny, it reminded me of a lot of people here at school, probably myself included.

I honestly had trouble watching the Frontline Digital Nation video. A bunch of regular people talking about their technology addiction on camera was too embarrassingly hilarious for me to handle.